Well, not really an excerpt
but the unabridged version that I submitted - twice as long as what was
included. I have no complaints (except for a few changes I made for
reprints)
about the shorter version he used, but I have no space constraints here
and want to put the whole thing in. This version has more stories.-DC

In the early '70s at a meeting of students at the
Western world's first Buddhist monastery, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center,
the agenda had been covered and there we all were sitting around the
dining room, enjoying the energy of being together talking, and not
wanting to go back to our cabins and to bed. The tables were pushed back
against the walls and 50 or so of us sat on straight-backed wooden chairs
loosely arranged in an oval, our faces highlighted by the flickering light
from the kerosene lamps. We didn't meet much like that -- maybe once or
twice in a ninety-day practice period. Someone broke the silence by saying
he'd like to conduct a poll on a topic of interest to him. The director,
who was leading the meeting, said "Okay, why not?"

"How many people here have taken LSD?" he asked. Most hands
shot up. The room filled with laughter.

"Do mescaline or psilosibin count?" A student asked.
"Yes," she was told. The student added her hand and a few others
went up. More laughter.

Then the pollster asked who'd had more than one trip and a number of
hands went down. This line of questioning continued. How many have had 5?
More hands down. Ten? Fifteen? And up the line with oos and ahs until only
a few hands remained. At 100 only one person's hand was up. He was a quite
serious student who'd meditated close to once a week on LSD for several
years before coming to the Zen Center. He went on to become one of the
teachers of this group.

It's undeniable that psychedelics played a central role in the hippie
counterculture revolution of the late '60s and early '70s, but sometimes
we forget that the same is true of the influence psychedelics had during
that same period on the emergence of Buddhism in America and a generations
search for spiritual experience. To the uninitiated, the word psychedelics
might conjure up media inspired images of colorfully dressed, long-haired
hippies adorned with flowers, beads, and blissed-out smiles tripping
around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, dancing kids taking a break from
the responsible course of their lives, or worse, destroying themselves.
They may think about the bad trips, the freak accidents when someone
decided they could walk in front of traffic free from harm or when Art
Linkletter's daughter died jumping from a building while on LSD. That's
all true, but it's a distorted image which neglects the sacramental role
of these substances, that ignores the myriad of people who were encouraged
on their spiritual journeys by one or more mind-expanding experiences with
psychedelics or entheogens as they are often called by scholars these
days. (The term psychedelic [mind-manifesting] has been supplanted by the
name entheogen [generating the divine from within] for much serious
discussion because of all the stigma attached to the former. These terms
are used to refer to psychoactives (chemicals which affect the central
nervous system) such as LSD, mescaline, psilosibin mushrooms, and what I
consider the lesser psychedelics like ecstasy and cannabis.)

After thirty-five years of being around a diffuse sub-culture of
Buddhist, Hindu, Shamanist, New Age, Sufi, Christian, and what-not
enlightenment seekers, I am familiar with the formative role psychedelics
has often played in their lives. This has been brought home again in the
course of years of interviews while working on the biography of Shunryu
Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and Zen Mountain
Center. Though many of the people I've known and interviewed have told me
that their psychedelic experiences, like mine, were a prime factor in the
early stages of their spiritual paths, most of them did not continue
psychedelic use. Many people just mention it in passing as in, "I
took LSD, read Alan Watts, and came to San Francisco looking for a
spiritual community." Recently, I received a letter in which a
retired professor of English wrote: "I still think LSD saved my life
- breaking me out of the Berkeley existential, druggie, deluded,
fashionable despair of the Beats." (The Beat writers were, on the
other hand, also major contributors to the West's new openness to Buddhism
and Eastern thought.) In a few cases I know of, an Asian priest tried LSD.
One Japanese Zen priest who took LSD in the sixties called it
"spiritual masturbation." Another took it and kept taking it for
years (until he got arrested in Japan) and calls it "powerful
medicine." Regardless of whether we view these psychoactives as
helpful in the short or long haul, it's clear they have been and continue
to be pivotal catalysts in the spiritual journey of a multitude of
seekers. They sure were for me.

I was unusual at the Zen Center in that I'd been brought up in a family
whose religion had much in common with Buddhism. My parents were my first
spiritual teachers. I was taught that God was not a being but infinite and
perfect mind. We didn't use the word "God" a lot, but we were
Christians. My father had been a reader in the Christian Science Church
but dropped out because he felt that they elevated Jesus way beyond being
an extraordinary human who had realized his divine nature. We had a non
theistic type of Christianity. One of my favorite memories of my father is
his telling me, "Davie my boy, you don't know how lucky you are you
weren't taught to believe in God." I knew he meant an anthropomorphic
god. He also told me that matter didn't exist and I wondered what the heck
he meant.

In Mexico at the age of 20 I discovered marijuana. It was an exciting
epiphanious year. There were endless insights. Me and my friends thought
that marijuana was the answer to all of the world's problems and was all
that was good. We liked to get stoned and ride the roller coaster in
Mexico City which I'd thoroughly enjoy as long as I didn't start wondering
about how well it was being maintained. At times I would get high, lie
down, close my eyes, and look for the kernel of my self and sometimes I
thought I'd found it. Then one day I ingested vile tasting peyote with
some friends, vomited, and went out walking on the streets. Everything was
moving, alive, newborn, and I remember holding the galvanized pole of a
traffic sign and saying that peyote had taken away all the cultural
overlay and I could see the pole for what it was (I was studying
anthropology at the time). I also discovered speed that year in the form
of Dexedrine and Benzedrine (which you could get in pharmacies without
prescription) I took it quite a bit till I decided to stop because more
and more it had negative results like hurting my complexion, encouraging
manic states, and making others not want to be near me. It was hard to
stop taking it but I did it without any help from the government.

Thinking I'd gone about as far as I could with marijuana (though I
didn't stop smoking it), I was eager to plummet deeper into my being with
the aid of LSD which I'd heard so much about -- both wondrous promises and
dire warnings (a guy in San Miguel de Allende had flushed his stash after
a bad trip). Back in the States I bought a copy of "The Psychedelic
Experience" by Harvard psychedelic pioneers Timothy Leary, Richard
Alpert (later to become Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner. To many,
psychedelics are dangerous drugs which should be illegal, those who
promote them are a scourge on society, and these men were like Pied
Pipers, leading America's youth into a bottomless pit of ruin. To lots of
us though, they brought good news, were the voices of new possibilities
who suggested a responsible way to take psychedelics so as to avoid the
pitfalls and awaken briefly to truths perennial and far more wonderful
then the materialism and narrow world view we were being home, school, and
media fed by our society. I took their book with me back to Mexico,
studied it carefully, and did not take any more speed.

A year later I went to San Francisco. In the carnival atmosphere I
tripped around smoking grass and met lots of new people who'd taken the
pilgrimage to that hub of the hippies. In that summer I had to go back
home to make an appearance for my draft induction physical that convinced
them they never wanted me in the army. I had an acid trip while in Texas
at that time that was most powerful. I followed the advice from The
Psychedelic Experience closely. It was modeled after the Tibetan Book of
the Dead. The point of both books is to guide one toward an experience of
the clear light. I had been told by people who'd been there that to
experience the clear light was to meet God, Buddha, ultimate truth, the
absolute ground of being, and on and on. I believed them. I still do. On
that day I reread the book beforehand, fasted, meditated, and as the sun
went down, took 500 micrograms of LSD, considered the maximum dose
necessary for total ego dissolving. There were two friends with me who
served as guides. Their job was to be a reference to reality if I got
paranoid or confused, and to remind me that we had an agreement to be
quiet (my studies and prior experience had indicated that almost all the
problems one encountered in a psychedelic experience where caused by
social interaction). My friends were also to read me brief sections of the
book when I showed an interest in communicating too much or needed to be
gently nudged off a negative course.

This was not a frivolous event. I was trembling with gulping
anticipation and knew the gravity of what I was about to do. Leary said
that he experienced the clear light on about half his once-a-week trips,
but he also said that he descended into a hell realm (there are endless
options there) about one out of five times. I knew from what I'd read,
talking to others, and a few skirmishes with lower realms on prior trips
that being in the grips of seemingly eternal, fantastically paranoid,
hideous horror was a possibility that I faced. When the pill washed down
my throat I foresaw my ego was about to die and gave in immediately. As
the LSD started to come on strong, my friends played, at my prior request,
the Beetles' perfectly appropriate "Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and
Float Downstream," and then there was only the sound of the gentle
waves of Lake Worth outside the screened porch as I lay on a cot and I did
float downstream, leave my friends, the bed, the waves, myself, and the
universe as I had known it, and passed through progressive visions each
more ecstatic, powerful, and subtle than the prior. The deeper I went, the
more familiar and wonderful it was. I felt I was going to my eternal home.

Leary advised taking a strong dose under these types of controls for
early trips because it got one quickly beyond the transitional states
where problems could come up as a result of one's ego fighting to maintain
control. I had not a stitch of a chance to fight or maintain any type of
control. I died, it seemed, as completely as one can die (even though my
body of course was quite alive) and found myself at one with all that is,
beyond space and time, birth and death. I was bathed in transcendent yet
immanent love - it was always changing - and then, the dualism even of
this oneness gave way and mind opened to the experience of the clear light
of which, later, I could really say nothing but that that experience
seemed to be the crowning glory of all that is and isn't. I felt that I
had experienced what a Hindu text described as greater than if 10,000 suns
were to explode in the sky. None of these experiences can be remembered
any more than the Pacific Ocean can fit into a thimble, but I came back
saying that the clear light was pure, unborn, ecstatic - things like that.
On that evening I emerged from the clear light into a calmer, perfect,
absolute, vast clarity with no sense of identity or physicality in it, a
state not characterized by any mundane attributes such as existence,
experience, or anything.

I remember some time later opening my eyes and seeing the stars through
the screened porch, then realizing that I had returned to awareness of
this universe which seemed dreamlike compared to the powerful bliss I had
died into. I thought, "oh yes, space, time, stars, and I'm on a
planet - this sort of reality." It seemed like one of an infinite
number of possible dream places I could have landed, and it was beautiful.
I soon realized I was there because I was tied in some way to a body which
seemed to me like an idea which kept repeating itself, all this being
experienced as a reflection in a mind beyond dimension - not located in
space or time but that which imagined space and time.

I felt as if I'd just been born, didn't remember anything about myself
and didn't know who the people were who were with me. I told them that if
I was in the way that they should feel free to dispose of me. They gently
urged me to lie back down and read me a few lines which cleared my mind. I
experienced spectacular visions gradually reentering into lower though
still quite exalted, brilliantly colorful states of mind. Every now and
then I'd sit up. I remember looking at my friends and seeing our bodies as
energy fields which grew out of the same base, like we were fingers on a
hand. I saw they thought they existed as independent beings and I told
them, "We don't exist in any way." No wonder so many people were
irritated by hippies.

In the days that followed I contemplated the experience I had had on
the lake and knew that there could be no purpose in my life to compare
with awakening to the essence of being I had known that night. I also
thought that taking more LSD or more of anything would not be the way to
get there. I picked up some of the books I had on Buddhism and Hinduism
and they made a lot more sense to me than before. I saw my normal state of
mind as being tiny, confused, and filled with giant mountains that blocked
knowledge of higher states. I knew LSD could evaporate these mountains but
was sure that they'd just return. It seemed that books alone wouldn't get
me there either. I thought that I needed to learn to meditate so as to
gradually wear the mountains down and thought that possibly there could be
a breakthrough satori experience after they'd been well eroded. I decided
to travel the world looking for a teacher and had some idea of finding a
community to meditate with. So I was off - first stop, a return to
California. Soon I was meditating regularly at the San Francisco Zen
Center.

In the Buddhist circles I'm familiar with, psychedelics are mainly seen
as something to forget about and move on from and a story like the one I
just told might elicit a been-there-done-that type of response. But I
remember these substances fondly because they gave me what I felt was
empirical evidence of the perennial goal of religion and philosophy and
helped me to get on the path. And to think that what I did is now illegal.
It wasn't yet then. I wonder what's going to happen to the nephew of a
friend of mine who just got arrested at a concert with three tabs of
ecstasy, now considered by the law to be like methamphetamine even though
it is quite different in effect and doesn't have full effect if you take
it more than once a month. This young man was planning on having a
transcendent experience. Now he's under criminal charges - and he's a
clean cut young guy.

To me, psychedelics are best used as a sacrament in an initiation
ceremony which is what my experience seems to have been. It may be better
for initiations to be conducted by elders or guides, but people,
especially young people, have for years been self-initiating because their
elders or their society are not there for them in this way. Society seems
mainly interested in shielding them from anything that would challenge
consensus reality, molding them into good workers and consumers, and
chastising them if they get caught being too out of line. I know that my
views on this are hopelessly astray from the norm, but I don't think that
I or others or the state should have the right to tell anyone who's body
has pretty much stopped growing that they can't do psychedelics or any
psychoactives. It's telling people that their own mind belongs to the
state, that the government, which has not set a very high moral or
spiritual example, can regulate spiritual inquiry and which states of mind
are legal. Like George W. Bush says, we should trust people to spend money
as they see fit, run their own lives, and make their own decisions without
government interference.

Taking LSD without proper precautions can lead to some unexpected
initiations, even if one thought that every care had been taken. I am
reminded of Mark, a high school student from Carmel, who in 1968 went with
a friend to Tassajara, an hour and a half away, for their first acid trip.
Anyone who'd read about how to take LSD knew that one should pick a calm,
trouble free setting, preferably a natural one (as well as a calm set, or
state of mind). Mark and his friend took it on the way, figuring they'd be
at Tassajara before the acid came on and that all they'd encounter would
be the inspiring vibes of the monastery and the nurturing warmth of the
hot springs there. They were coming in late after everyone was asleep.
They thought they were in a safe and controlled setting. But they didn't
count on Larry.

Larry was an ex-biker with a steel plate in his head that was inserted
after a motorcycle accident. He was a big tough sweet guy who was trying
to set his life straight. Larry had stumbled upon Tassajara a few weeks
prior. Normally we didn't take students off the road and would not have
let him stay without first having some Zen practice experience elsewhere,
but he was a mechanic and we didn't have one at the time. So he'd been
living there on a temporary basis, working in the shop, trying hard to sit
zazen at least a little, and to fit in with the community. Sometimes he'd
get out of sorts and I'd take him to the kitchen and make him a stack of
cheese sandwiches and that would calm him down.

On that day Larry had gone to town in our pickup truck to buy parts.
The town was Monterrey which was an hour and forty-five minutes away -
over the fifteen mile dirt road for the first half and then on paved roads
through Carmel Valley. A sensitive, attractive, young woman student who
needed to go to the dentist went with him. That night Larry and the woman
were on their way back to Tassajara. He'd promised he wouldn't drink but
his desires got the best of him and he'd gotten drunk and come on to her
when they'd stopped to view the stars from the top of the mountain. She'd
resisted him but he continued his advances and she'd gotten out of the
vehicle and walked ahead. Larry sat in the pickup and sulked.

At this point Mark and his friend pulled up next to Larry on the dirt
road and asked how far Tassajara was. Larry told them it was about five
miles down the mountain road. He added that there was a girl ahead walking
and if they picked her up he'd kill them. Their acid was just beginning to
come on, a little earlier than they expected, and the word kill surely
reverberated through their minds fostering uncontrollable waves of
associated images and fearful dread. Shaken up they drove on and came upon
a woman waving her arms at them. Gallantly they let her in and zoomed down
the road biting their fingernails and sensing signs of looming peril at
every turn as their normal sense of security, proportion, and the passing
of time gave way to the distortions of their normal minds meeting emerging
eternity.

Down at Tassajara, I was the firewatch, the person whose duty it was to
walk around, blow out the hurricane lamps on the pathways, make sure all
kerosene lamps in the cabins were out, and periodically strike together
two wooden clackers that announced all was well and nighty-night. This was
the summer guest season and we had about fifty guests visiting and fifty
students in residence. I heard a vehicle approaching down the road and
could tell by the engine's whine that it wasn't the pick up truck I was
expecting. I walked up toward the gate in time to see car lights pull over
to the side and shut off. I heard car doors open and close and soon the
woman was running down the road crying. I tried to talk to her but she ran
right past me. Looking back, I saw two shadowy figures dart into the tall
grass between the road and the creek. I was just about to go check them
out when the pickup truck came barreling in through the open gate and
screeched to an abrupt halt beside me. I was confused. Why didn't she come
back with Larry? Then I shined my flashlight on him and saw his puffy
drunken unshaven face with a menacing gleam in his eye. A gust of alcohol
laden breath wafted into my face and I knew there was trouble. He asked
where the woman and the two guys were. I said she'd gone to her room and I
didn't know where they were. He looked back outside the gate then abruptly
went to the tool shed. While I asked things like, "What's up
Larry?" and tried to talk, he single-mindedly went through the
sharpened axes and I was greatly relieved, though not for long, when he
finally settled on a long ax handle.

"Those goddamn guys picked her up after I'd told them not to and
I'm gonna find them and beat their goddamn brains out," he said. He
then proceeded to walk toward the exact spot where they were as I stayed
close to his side and tried to dissuade him. Finally I said they weren't
up there, that they'd gone to bed and we could all talk about it the next
day. "They've gone to bed where?" he asked. I said I had no idea
- probably some cabin. "Then I'm gonna go through every goddamn cabin
till I find them," he said and started down the road with me
literally hanging on to him and pleading for him to reconsider. The
students could deal with him but the guests - oh lord. I finally convinced
him that at least he should take a break and have some cheese sandwiches.
We went to the kitchen where I lit a lamp and made him five thick cheese
sandwiches. He ate them, got sleepy, and soon I was tucking him in bed.
Mark and his friend lay in the tall grass all night hallucinating
mind-expanded nightmares of violent death. The next morning Larry was
driven out - sad and ashamed.

Mark was much more careful after that about his use of psychedelics and
went on to become a Zen student who didn't use them anymore (maybe a
little pot now and then). But he never forgot his first time. Just think -
he could have been arrested and sent to jail for taking LSD by a legal
system which has no more sense or subtlety than Larry did, a zealous jihad
type legal system which can't be deflected by bribes of mere cheese
sandwiches.

Ministers, priests, psychologists, and various types of spiritual
teachers back in the sixties had an interesting situation to deal with.
Lots of people were coming to them who'd had psychedelic experiences like
mine or Mark's, and who were looking for an explanation of what they'd
experienced or seeking a more grounded and lasting way to meet the
vastness of higher consciousness. Many of these counselors had no idea
what to say or summarily dismissed these experiences as bogus. Some, like
Shunryu Suzuki, were more helpful. Suzuki had a way that worked well with
such seekers. He told us that enlightenment was not a state of mind, was
not contained in any experience, and he guided us away from trying to
recreate past profound events and toward accepting ourselves as we were.
He taught a disciplined life of zazen meditation, attention to the details
of life, not wanting too much (especially another state of mind), and not
getting too worked up. He said that people will have enlightenment
experiences without spiritual practice, but only with such practice will
their revelation continue and not come and go like psychedelic
experiences. He made us feel confident that we could wake up to who we
were without any chemical aids, and he did it without taking any strong
stand against marijuana and LSD, though he really didn't want his students
taking them. He appreciated psychedelics as an initial impetus, but not as
a way of life.

A Stanford professor told Suzuki in the late sixties that he
appreciated the open minds and curiosity of this new breed of young people
but wished they'd stop being stoned long enough to pay more attention to
their studies. He asked Suzuki how he dealt with that problem. Suzuki told
the professor that he just taught his students how to sit zazen and that
they soon forgot about drugs. But if he thought they weren't forgetting
about it he could be stricter. He asked his students not to come to his
temple under the influence of drugs or alcohol. At a wedding he performed,
the colorfully dressed bride and groom were actively involved in the local
psychedelic sub-culture. In a stern tone he admonished those assembled,
many of them stoned at the time, that "we do not take drugs,"
and after he had gone on a bit and had made that clear, he continued with
the ceremony. Suzuki had a light touch, and he offered an alternative.

Back at Tassajara this summer I spent some time talking to the DA of a
medium-sized rural California city. I asked him what he thought about the
War on Drugs. He said that his office concentrated on methamphetamine,
that it was the drug causing the biggest rip in the fabric of society. He
said that he'd seen too many young people who'd grown up in homes where
there was heavy meth use who knew no other way but violence to express any
personal power. He had no qualms about prosecuting those who manufactured
and sold the speed drugs (like meth and coke).

He and I talked more. He'd been wild in his youth. We'd had similar
experiences with excessive teenage drinking and the lack of judgment that
can engender. He was younger though and had also smoked pot and taken a
lot of LSD as a teenager. I asked him if he thought that psychedelics
should be illegal. "In theory or reality?" he asked. I said that
I didn't know - just whatever he thought. His answer surprised me. After a
moment of reflection he said, "I don't know how I could have come to
the understanding of life that I now have, if I hadn't taken LSD." He
paused and added firmly, "But I don't want to see my kids taking it
and going to school high on it." Of course not. That seems
unthinkable to me. But I know a woman who says she took LSD every day of
her senior year of high school. That's so crazy. I wonder how it effected
her. You have to wait at least a week between trips to get the full effect
so it must have been nothing compared to what I think of as acid. But
anyway, she survived it without government assistance and is now a
successful artist.

As with the DA's concerns about his kids, one of the major arguments
for the War on Drugs is to protect children. I am reminded of Tom Lehrer's
song, "The Old Dope Peddler" which conjures up an image in my
mind of a seedy character hanging out near a schoolyard just waiting to
hook the kids on contraband (first one's free). But of course drugs, legal
and illegal, can cause very serious problems for the young.

I was walking with an old friend ( who has a prescription for
marijuana) down the street in a quaint nearby village surrounded by
redwoods. We passed some scruffy looking young people slouching the other
way down the sidewalk. My friend shuddered and went "Oh no," and
put his hand to his heart. He pointed out a girl who looked nervous,
haggard, and hollow-eyed and said she'd obviously been taking speed. I
could see it. She looked bad. He said that the last time he'd seen her, a
year before then, she was a beautiful, happy, bright young girl. He was
just sick about it. Imagine what her parents were going through.

I know a woman who taught school in an inner city near here and many of
her students came from homes with serious alcohol and hard drug problems
which were reflected in the kids. They were just in elementary school but
some were pretty violent, miserable, hard to teach, and an awful burden on
the other students who wanted to be good and do well in school. There was
a woman across the street from the school who had a bunch of pre
school-age kids that she kept locked up behind a cyclone fence while she
went out and turned tricks to get her crack. My friend thought those kids
should have been taken away from her. The woman was pregnant again. My
friend thought that she should be sterilized. I told her that that was the
way the eugenicists thought earlier in the last century, that they were
influential on Nazi thinking, and that that approach was taboo. She didn't
care. She had to teach kids from homes like that and it was like a fourth
of her class was retarded and emotionally disturbed. Of course these kids
came from very poor homes so isolating drugs as the sole cause of their
problems is surely shortsighted.

Images like those, news of all the violence from the inner city drug
turf wars, and people's real or media-driven fear for their safety help to
fuel the War on Drugs whose propaganda lumps all illegal psychoactives
together and goes after them in an uneven blitzkrieg. Alexander Shulgin,
sometimes called the grandfather of ecstasy, wrote that "the
entheogens are the dolphins caught in the tuna net of the War on
Drugs." Aside from all those incarcerated for narcotics and
stimulants, there are lots and lots of people being arrested, prosecuted,
and locked up for dealing and using ecstasy, LSD, and especially
marijuana. There's a lawyer named Len Tillem who has a radio call-in show
on a local AM station who was answering a question asked by a young man
who'd been arrested with a quarter pound of marijuana in his car. At one
point Tillem said, "Let me say for the record, that I think the War
on Drugs is crazy, and the War on Marijuana is especially crazy."

I wonder sometimes why more people don't come out against the War on
Drugs in its present form. It's so extremely costly, ineffective, and as
William Buckley says, a solution that causes more harm than the problem.
We all want to deal with these problems but I think we could come up with
a better way to deal with the situation - especially when the available
budget is considered. I guess one reason is because upstanding people
don't want to be associated with illegal drugs which are sort of the
opposite of apple pie. Others may not want to call attention to themselves
because they may have some illegal drugs in their possession. I'm not
worried because if I have anything it's only a little roach or two someone
gave me and the authorities would never find them (If I have any I keep
them in the drawer to the left of my computer in my office over the
garage).

In a local wine tasting shop the other day a few of us were trying to
figure how many non violent offenders were in the criminal justice system
in America for drugs. That includes those in prisons, jails, on parole,
and on probation. We got on a laptop with a wireless modem and in a few
minutes had a choice of many sites on the War on Drugs (called in one
place "The War on Some Drugs" which a stoner friend of mine
calls the War on People.). There were lots of interesting statistics on
the Internet. In the few minutes we spent, we didn't find figures on
parole or probation and lots of stuff we wanted to know, but we did find
that according to recent figures, there are about a million folks, almost
entirely non violent offenders, in a slammer for some psychoactive or
other (two Woodstocks), about forty percent of all those incarcerated in
the US. On the national NORML (National Organization for the Repeal of
Marijuana Laws) site we found out that, according to government figures,
seventy million Americans had smoked Marijuana since 1972 and ten million
of them had been arrested since then. I think that it might be more like
fifteen million according to some other up to date figures I've seen since
then, but I'm not sure - anyway, very very many many. That was the year
the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse issued its
recommendation to Congress to decriminalize marijuana. In the few minutes
we spent, we couldn't find how many people were in prison for life without
possibility of parole for pot, but I'd read in the Atlantic Monthly years
ago that it was hundreds. It was surprising to see that under President
Clinton's watch marijuana arrests are up 60% - at an arrest every 45
seconds. I remember him being asked about the possibility of
decriminalizing some drugs and how he went on sappily about his baby
half-brother's cocaine problem and what it had put the family through. I'm
glad his brother wasn't an overeater. I think Clinton ought to be as
forgiving of the sins of others as many of us have been of his. I also
think it would be the Christian thing to do.

Back to the kids. I was walking through Washington Square in Greenwich
Village last year with Mark from Tassajara acid trip fame and we stopped
to join a crowd gathered around an entertainer. He was a ballsy Chinese
American comic who was pretending that he was a martial arts expert about
to show us great feats of skill. At one point, he had a thick board he was
going to break in two with his bare hand, but he just kept talking and
leading up to his great feat and then after he'd done that for a while, he
put the board down and went on to some other tease. At one point he asked
for applause and when it wasn't sufficient he pulled out a supper soaker
water gun to further motivate the crowd which responded by applauding and
cheering him as he wished. But he still didn't feel the applause was great
enough so he unleashed the soaker at random saying, "I'm doing it …
FOR THE CHILDREN!" He seems to have captured the mood of the times.
We want to help the children but we're not doing a very good job. We're
just shooting at random and pouring big bucks into the bottomless pockets
of the War on Drugs industry. I think it's more for those who profit from
this so-called war than for the children.

Funny thing is that there seems to be an epidemic of giving legal drugs
to kids. A young woman I know tells of how her parents and doctor put her
on Ritalin when she was six because she was considered hyperactive. (I've
taken Ritalin and it just seems like a mild form of meth.) By the time she
was twelve she had developed ticks and nervousness to a degree that she
was (can you believe it?) diagnosed with Turret's Syndrome and given drugs
for that. In high school she was on so many prescribed drugs that she was
supplementing her allowance by dealing them at school. On her eighteenth
birthday she announced to her parents, "No more of your drugs!"
Now she only smokes pot and takes ecstasy or mushrooms occasionally and is
glad to be free from of all the legal drugs that made her so miserable.
She is a libertarian and has absolutely no respect for authority. And now,
because of the choices she's made, she can get arrested.

Lots of people have no respect for authority because of how the powers
that be are all behind legal drugs and demonize all illegal drugs together
in one basket. There's nothing quite as effective in undermining a young
person's respect for the law as when they try pot and find it to be benign
and fun and at times profound. I remember an old man telling me in the
sixties that America used to be a nation where people respected the law -
until Prohibition. "One day a whole lot of us became criminals,"
he told me, "And it was never again the same."

The War on Drugs also, in the eyes of many, makes criminals out of
those in law enforcement, good people who we want to respect and support.
Steve Kubby, a leader in passing the medical marijuana initiative and the
libertarian candidate for Governor in California, publicly opposes the War
on Drugs. It's well known he has a prescription for medical marijuana. In
1998 twenty heavily armed officers invaded his home, arrested him and his
wife, and terrified their three year old daughter. Remember when the feds
took Elian Gonzales at gunpoint how so many legislators were appalled and
said things like "This isn't America!" Well it is America. This
type of thing is happening daily all over America. There's an endless list
of sickening statistics and horror stories. Otherwise law abiding citizens
have had to choose between testifying against their spouses or going to
jail and loosing their children.

Robert S. Deropp in his book "Drugs and the Mind," defined
humans as a drug taking animal. He said that throughout history people
have always taken whatever psychoactive they could get their hands on that
would give them an experience of other than normal consciousness.
Strangely, but even with our puritanical bent, America sure fills that
bill. We're so drug crazy it's unbelievable -- for legal as well as
illegal drugs. Doctors must get writers cramp writing scripts for mood
altering drugs like Prozac (a favorite among Mormons who can't take
anything that is considered recreational). We may be drug taking animals,
but it seems humans can also be defined as a persecuting animal. We're so
used to persecuting each other that we don't notice when it's going on all
around us - especially when the poor and disempowered are the main ones
being persecuted. The War on Drugs can be seen as a power drug the
government is addicted to. I think it's just old-fashioned persecution
and, at least in the case of psychedelics, it's religious persecution.
(Thomas Szasz characterizes it all as religious persecution.) It's like
McCarthyism, the witch burnings, and throwing the infidels to the lions.
And so many of us don't notice it or think anything untoward is happening
- just like the folks who went about their lives oblivious to there being
anything terrible happening during those prior persecutions.

There's a proposition (which passed) before the voters of California
which would allow many arrested for illegal drugs to be deferred to
treatment programs rather than prison cells. Martin Sheen, an actor who is
known for his devotion to liberal causes, is the spokesman for the
opposition. His thought on the subject seems to be based on his experience
with his two sons' drug problems. Nothing seemed to work for them but
taking away their freedom. I must admit that just about everyone I know
who has been busted for drugs has benefited from it. They quit making or
dealing or taking tons of whatever they were busted for and set their
lives on a new course. But these people that I know, and probably those
that Sheen knows, are by and large educated white folks with financial
resources and good lawyers. They didn't get twenty year sentences. I've
also known people who feel they benefited from being in Japanese POW camps
and from getting cancer.

No one I know wants their kids or friends to take strong stimulants or
narcotics just like we don't want them to be constantly stoned-out pot
heads or excessive drinkers. We don't want them to get caught up in all
the gangster business that meets the demand not curtailed much by the
present Prohibition. But a lot of us have done these things to one extent
or another without robbing people or getting violent and have grown out of
it. It seems that in our eagerness these days to protect ourselves from
worst case scenarios, we're reacting like Stalin did in fear of his
enemies and we have turned a blind eye to the suffering we've caused. I
remember the cover of a Northern California weekly newspaper with a
headline which read "Gulag California" above a photo of a long
concrete hall overcrowded with depressed looking prisoners mulling about
in and out of the cells. One point of the article, as I remember it (it
may have been fifteen years ago), was that many of those in jails and
prisons are there just for having illegal drugs, and not for being
violent, stealing things, or breaking any other law. I gazed at the faces
and could not believe that they were all dangerous enemies of the state
who should be locked up. I was reminded of the line from Bob Dylan's song,
Chimes of Freedom: "And for each unharmful, gentle soul
misplaced inside a jail."

There are some engaged Buddhists these days who are working in the
prisons, with homelessness and various social ills that bring them in
touch with the victims of drugs and the War on Drugs. I salute these
active Buddhists and non Buddhists too who are doing what they can to
reduce all this suffering and confusion. But most of us don't know what to
do and aren't doing anything. We've got zazen at Auschwitz and peace
ceremonies on Hiroshima day; we remember these high ticket items and nobly
proclaim may it never happen again while all around us something very bad
is happening now.

It's a lovely day in late September. I sit at the top of the steps to
my office and look out over the trees and rooftops to see the clear blue
Sonoma sky. I wish there was such clarity in how American society dealt
with the use and abuse of psychoactives. I wish there was such clarity in
my mind about what, if anything, I could do. I pray to be alert for any
opportunities that present themselves. I doze off and dream. My nightmare
is Gulag America, the War on Drugs finally won by turning our shining land
into one giant prison where we are all born and die, never to know there
ever existed any such things as privacy or personal rights. My sweet dream
is that I fly around the country miraculously freeing all those who've
lost their freedom to drugs and prisons, and on the day following this
gallant act of psychoactivism we all celebrate together in harmony,
enjoying our natural minds and the good earth's fresh air and sunshine.